Apache Black Gila

The fierce-looking Black Gila is the most recent offering
from the industrious folks working the Apache Strata Quarry.

This hone just arrived, and I’ve only the time to shoot
these three photos. The first impression is that this
feels like a very dense and hard stone. Testing will follow; after I get a read on it, I’ll post my review here.

Prelim test, 5/24/2015.

Having lapped out the factory
scratches on a progression of SIC, I see one spot at one end is low, but enough
of the stone is flat enough for my needs. It arrived with a bounty of scratches
from the quarry, so that needs to be dealt with. This stone is very hard, and
distractions like that can give a false negative on edge performance.

This is one tough stone – it’s hard
like a Translucent Ark and possibly even harder than that. Lapping it on
anything but SIC powder will mean investing an exponentially greater amount of
time than I’m comfortable with. The Atoma 400x performed well initially, but
the deeper scratches in the Gila were stubborn. SIC powder sped up the process
well. 220, 400, 600 - maybe 15 minutes with clean up. The surface is
slightly matte and 99.9% of the factory scratches are gone. Not perfect but, as
they say - good enough for gov’t work.

First test blade took a killer
polish really quickly. Feel is not like Chalcedony, Jaspers, or either of the
two other Strata. Honestly – the honing feel is very much like my surgical
black Arkansas. This is a very dense stone, it pushes back at you so pressure
has to be regulated meticulously. My first test razor, which was a junk blade
sitting in a cup on my bench, took a very high polish over a rusty bevel very
quickly – maybe 12 passes with what I’d call moderate-light pressure. I tested
the other side of that razors bevel on my Apache Strata, and while there was a
similar effect of rust removal and polishing – the efforts on the Gila proved
to be significantly greater.

So far – I’m impressed. To judge –
I’d say this stone could prove to be finer than the Apache Strata and it may
turn out to be more efficacious and have greater latitude.

8/8/2015

So, I finally got around to cutting and trimming the stone
to suit my tastes. There were some bothersome distractions that precluded this
stone from being usable right out of the box. No big deal – most stones need
some work – this one needed some extra work though. One of the original flaws was a fissure running across the top, down the
side, and to the bottom of the stone; it was grabbing the blade, and it left a
nasty scar in the edge. Atoma 400x and elbow grease to the rescue.

Here, in this pic – the stone is nearly ready. I still need
to check it again for ultimate flatness and smoothness though. This is a very
hard stone and any irregularities in the working surface will definitely cause an
issue. The small piece of Gila is seeing
use as a dressing stone for the top.

As I had surmised early on, this is a really nice stone,
with a lot of potential. It may be a type of Jasper, but I’m not sure. Whatever
it is – the polish its leaving on the razor’s bevel is outstanding.